


Better With Practice

by RoseisaRoseisaRose



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: F/M, First Kiss, Fluff, Pre-Timeskip | Academy Phase (Fire Emblem: Three Houses), blue lions - Freeform, everyone in this fic is a disaster, everyone in this fic is trying their best, well sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-20
Updated: 2020-06-20
Packaged: 2021-03-04 03:15:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24816709
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RoseisaRoseisaRose/pseuds/RoseisaRoseisaRose
Summary: Felix usually walks Annette back to her room without saying much. Tonight, he tries talking.It goes about as well as you might expect.
Relationships: Annette Fantine Dominic/Felix Hugo Fraldarius
Comments: 36
Kudos: 137





	Better With Practice

Annette liked the walks. They were nice. She was in the habit of walking in the mornings, anyways, but a combination of early morning chores and late night study sessions had caused her to miss her chances more often than not, so she didn’t mind switching to the evenings. The late autumn air was crisp and chilly without being cold, and the trees were fiery as the sun set. It was really a lovely way to spend her evenings.

She just wished Felix would say something, sometimes.

The first time had been more of less an accident – she’d put in her meager hours of archery training, which the professor had insisted on for some bizarre reason, and Felix happened to leave the training grounds the same time she had. The second time had been maybe more on purpose – Felix had poked his head in the library and reminded her they both had kitchen duty the next morning and she’d better not oversleep and make him do it all himself. He’d stood awkwardly in the doorway as she packed up her books and notes and coat and scarf, and he’d walked back with her to her room.

He hadn’t said much those times, so she figured, as was logical, that he hated her. But when he kept finding her, when he went out of his way to walk her somewhere and then blatantly reversed back towards where they’d started after they arrived at her door, when he casually asked her if she was doing anything after dinner that night – eventually, she figured he didn’t hate her.

Maybe he just didn’t have much to say.

“So . . . you doing anything tonight?” Annette asked him as they looped back from the marketplace and towards the dorms. Quiet contemplation was well enough sometimes, but last night she’d caught herself absently singing a song about frogs to fill the silence, and worse, she’d caught him smiling about it. So she was determined that tonight she would act like a normal person who didn’t sing about frogs and had pleasant conversations, instead.

“Probably training,” Felix said, looking straight ahead, his hands stuffed in his jacket pockets. “Maybe axes. I’m out of practice.”

“That sounds fun,” Annette said brightly. She liked axes well enough; the weight did most of the work for her.

“Not really,” Felix said, and Annette deflated, slightly. She tried to push axe songs out of her head as they rounded the fish pond.

“Oh,” she said. Linhardt was still at the end of the dock that evening, and his eyes were a little too focused in their direction as they walked by him. Annette was used to Linhardt as not focusing at all, and she looked away hurriedly as they made eye contact. Not that she had anything to hide. Lots of people took evening walks.

“Are you doing anything tonight?” The question caught Annette by surprise. She looked up at Felix just as he looked away.

“Mercie’s going to come over and we’re going to go over some Faith notes,” she said brightly. “And maybe journal. I have a new one.”

“That sounds . . . fun,” Felix said.

Annette beamed at the encouragement, and launched into an explanation of how she really shouldn’t have paid so much for it, but Anna had promised her it was a good deal and she was going to run out space in her old one soon, and the cover had roses etched on it and she loved roses, and it was going to be so nice to have a record of her time at Garreg Mach, and she and Mercie got such a kick out of reading their journals from the School of Sorcery, not that she would ever tell him what was in them, and that took a long enough time to get through that they were not only at the dorms, but up the stairs and at her door, before she’d really managed to say everything she wanted to say about journals.

“Well!” Annette said brightly, turning to face Felix. “Here we are!”

“Here we are,” Felix repeated.

Neither turned to leave.

“Here. . . we are,” Annette added, and there could be no doubt to their location, after that confirmation.

Somewhere in the distance, the last of the summer crickets started up a solo concerto.

“I guess have fun with axes,” Annette said. “Although – I guess you said they weren’t very fun. That was kind of a dumb thing for me –”

“I really like talking to you,” Felix said, his voice taking on an edge of panic, as if what he said was significant.

“For me to say,” Annette finished. She blinked up at him. “I’m sorry, what?”

“I like talking to you,” Felix clarified. “Really.” He moved to stuff his hands in his pockets, and then seemed to think better of it, and rested a hand on the door above Annette’s head. “You’re a lot smarter than anyone else here,” he explained. “It’s not – it’s not annoying to talk to you.”

“Oh!” said Annette, suddenly remembering that Felix was very tall, although right now his gaze seemed closer to her than she remembered it usually being. She leaned back against the door, looking up at him. “That’s – I’m not sure that’s really a very good compliment, Felix!”

“Right, yeah – I’m bad at those,” Felix said, his earns turning slightly red. He looked away. “I should, go then. Forget I said anything.”

“Felix,” Annette said, reaching out and grabbing his arm. He flinched as she touched him, and she flinched in response, dropping her hand and retreated against the door again. But he looked back at her. “I just think, well,” she said, not sure where she was going with this. “It was a good start. You might get better if you practice more.” She smiled at him, hoping it looked similar to the way she’d seen Hilda smile at boys, or Dorothea, although judging by the look of absolute panic that momentarily crossed over Felix’s face, she hadn’t succeeded.

“I can . . . do that,” he said, shifting his weight to his arm above Annette’s head. “I like practicing,” he added, and he leaned down and Annette realized her smile might have  _ worked _ and she wondered if there was a second step, that she had missed, Hilda and Dorothea usually left the room at this point and she didn’t have many other examples, and he was  _ much _ closer than she was used to and had he always been that tall was that why it was so weird that he was scarcely inches away from her now –

The door behind Annette clicked open, and she lost her balance and pitched backwards and Felix lost his balance and pitched forward. He grasped at the doorknob with one hand and Annette with the other and neither did much good as he faceplanted against her.

“One second, Mercie!” Annette called frantically, grabbing the doorknob, her fingers over Felix’s, and yanking it shut as she pushed herself upright, or something close to it, Felix still unplastering his face from her sternum. She pushed him back gently, and watched as his found his balance, suddenly finding herself much more interested in his footwork than his face.

“That was – practice helps, I think,” Annette said, not looking up. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. His shoes were very polished, she realized. She liked that; she wasn’t sure why.

“Yeah, I hope so,” Felix said. “Goodnight.”

By the Annette found the courage to look up again, he was halfway down the stairs and heading to the training grounds. He didn’t looked back.

Annette fumbled behind her until she found the doorknob and flung the door open. Mercie was standing by her desk, her hands over her mouth in horror, or amusement, or both.

“Annie, I’m so sorry,” she said, pulling Annette into the room and slamming the door closed behind them. “I didn’t expect – he usually leaves you at the stairs, doesn’t he! I thought maybe you’d locked yourself out again.”

“It’s fine, Mercie, I don’t mind,” Annette said, collapsing on her bed and half-heartedly pulling off her boots before throwing them across her room to land in a corner. “I wasn’t expecting it, either!”

“I hope I didn’t interrupt anything,” said Mercedes with an encouraging smile. When Annette became overly interested in the buckle on her left boot, Mercedes giggled and took a seat next to her on the bed. “Annie – did I interrupt anything?”

“I think it was three inches too low and thirty seconds too short to really qualify as ‘anything,’ Mercie,” Annette said. And then suddenly she was giggling, and she couldn’t stop giggling, and she flopped backwards into Mercedes’ lap, looking up at her. “Mercie, I  _ like _ him,” she said, covering her face with her hands. “Isn’t that strange?”

“I think he might like you, too,” Mercedes said serenely, smoothing down the frizzled edges of Annette’s hair.

“Yes, he thinks I’m ‘not annoying,’” Annette said, lowering her hands to stare up at her friend. “All my dreams have come true.”

“Well, it’ll make for an amazing first journal entry, at least,” Mercedes pointed out, and although Annette only laughed in reply, she couldn’t wait to see how she would fill the rose-speckled pages in the next few months at Garreg Mach, and how much better things were going to get.

**Author's Note:**

> I cannot for the life of me imagine Felix actually asking a girl on a date, but I absolutely can imagine him following a girl around and listening to her talk and convincing himself that this is maybe probably what dates are like. It's not a _good_ strategy but it's better than challenging her to armed combat, which is the other thing I can imagine him doing.
> 
> Anyway these two are disasters; I love them.
> 
> [ Twitter links if you want. ](https://twitter.com/Rose3Writes)


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